I do geological engineering so I am forced to learn all sorts of terrible rock and mineral names. The rock names are much better.. they usually adhere to a couple of "accepted" standards (e.g. the igneous rock triangle). There is no standard for mineral naming, whoever found it can name it, or its just been something carried over through the years. No sense at all. The funny one I know is buried in the amphiboles (garbage rock, lots of substituition going on) theres a particulary amphibole called "Cummingtonite". Who knows what was going on when that one was named.. but I wouldn't want to touch the doorknobs.
Actaully.. look up any Large Igenus Province (LIP) and flood basalts.. E.g.. the Karoo Basin. You'll find that they seem to correlate nicely with mass species extinction events due to the amount of crap the spew out. These things are not small. I mean.. the columbia river basalts are 1000m thick. Thats not some little volcano cranking out a flow now and then. Thats something spewing out a massive amount of CO2
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I do geological engineering so I am forced to learn all sorts of terrible rock and mineral names. The rock names are much better.. they usually adhere to a couple of "accepted" standards (e.g. the igneous rock triangle). There is no standard for mineral naming, whoever found it can name it, or its just been something carried over through the years. No sense at all. The funny one I know is buried in the amphiboles (garbage rock, lots of substituition going on) theres a particulary amphibole called "Cummingtonite". Who knows what was going on when that one was named.. but I wouldn't want to touch the doorknobs.
Actaully.. look up any Large Igenus Province (LIP) and flood basalts.. E.g.. the Karoo Basin. You'll find that they seem to correlate nicely with mass species extinction events due to the amount of crap the spew out. These things are not small. I mean.. the columbia river basalts are 1000m thick. Thats not some little volcano cranking out a flow now and then. Thats something spewing out a massive amount of CO2